US President George W. Bush's security detail has a different breed of assailant to guard against while he attends the meeting of NATO leaders in Bucharest -- the city's infamous stray dogs.
Special squads of dogcatchers are already stationed along the road from the airport to the Palace of the Parliament, where the meeting will be held this week, to prevent the beasts from harassing delegates on foot or nipping at the wheels of their motorcades.
Meanwhile, the rest of the city remains under a worsening canine occupation.
The city government reports that 9,000 people are bitten each year here by dogs, though those numbers include bites by strays and pets. Officials will not venture a guess at the number of strays and estimates of the semi-feral population in the local news media range from 30,000 to 200,000 dogs.
But everyone agrees that the problem has been growing recently, thanks to a January law that prohibits the city from euthanizing the dogs. Also unable to spay or neuter the dogs and return them to the street, city officials are facing severe overcrowding at the pound and a paralysis of policing.
"Because the shelters are full, we cannot capture the dogs," Simona Panaitescu, director of the city's administration for animal supervision, said of the canine Catch-22. "We are stuck in the middle."
The city used to nab 1,500 dogs each month, Panaitescu said, of which 80 percent were put down and 20 percent adopted.
The local debate flared up earlier this year when two women were mauled by stray dogs in separate attacks.
A Japanese businessman was killed in January 2006 when he was bitten in the femoral artery.
The stray dogs of Romania are one of the longest running stories in Eastern Europe. Their population first exploded when the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu demolished thousands of houses to make way for an ill-considered reconstruction plan.
Residents forced to move into tiny apartments had no room for their dogs, which they then put out on the street.
Throughout Romania, dogs can be seen trotting along the sides of roads and peering from perches on trash bins. At night, their baying and barking provides a constant backdrop, like the honking of car horns in big cities.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday declared martial law in an unannounced late night address broadcast live on YTN television. Yoon said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure in order to safeguard free and constitutional order, saying opposition parties have taken hostage of the parliamentary process to throw the country into a crisis. "I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free
‘ANCIENT AND MODERN’: The project, which took 22 years to complete, unearthed more than 300,000 treasures now on display across the network It caused untold commotion, decades of disruption and — among historians and archeologists — controversy and despair, but at midday on Saturday, the antiquities-rich subterranean world of Thessaloniki opened to a world of driverless trains and high-tech automation with the inauguration of its long-awaited subway. The excitement on the streets of the northern Greek port city is almost palpable. “Archaeologically, it has been an extremely complex and difficult endeavor,” said Greek Minister of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs Lina Mendoni of the more than 300,000 finds made since construction began 22 years ago. “To get here required a battle on many
The US deployed a reconnaissance aircraft while Japan and the Philippines sent navy ships in a joint patrol in the disputed South China Sea yesterday, two days after the allied forces condemned actions by China Coast Guard vessels against Philippine patrol ships. The US Indo-Pacific Command said the joint patrol was conducted in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone by allies and partners to “uphold the right to freedom of navigation and overflight “ and “other lawful uses of the sea and international airspace.” Those phrases are used by the US, Japan and the Philippines to oppose China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the
‘AMERICA FIRST’: Patel, 44, previously called for stripping the FBI of its intelligence-gathering role and purging its ranks of anyone who refuses to support Trump’s agenda US president-elect Donald Trump has tapped Kash Patel to be FBI director, nominating a loyalist to lead the chief US law enforcement agency — which Trump has long derided as corrupt. Patel rose to prominence expressing outrage over the agency’s investigation into whether Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. With the nomination of Patel, Trump is signaling that he is preparing to carry out his threat to oust FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican first appointed by Trump during his first term as president, whose 10-year term at the FBI does not expire until 2027. FBI
RSS